


joy in the morning.

by outpastthemoat



Series: song of songs [11]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Biblical References, Depression, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-07-16 06:00:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7255327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean feels it again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	joy in the morning.

Dean feels something again one day in early spring, when the trees are filling out with a grayish green haze.  

He’s standing beside the Impala, parked on the shoulder of a highway in Tennessee, and he’s sniffing the air.  It smells like damp earth and rainwater, and something is rushing through him and filling him up.  It hits him like the shock of a cold shower, or your first step outside after it snows, and he has to stand still for a long moment just to absorb it.  It feels him up in places he didn’t even know were empty.  

Castiel notices.  He’s not great at catching onto some things.  Sam cut his hair above his ears three months ago and he’d finally caught on last week.  But Dean has noticed that he is good at noticing the important moments.  The ones that matter in some way.  If Castiel is noticing, this must be one.

“What is it, Dean?” Castiel is asking.  The wind is causing his dark hair to tumble into his eyes, and Castiel is pushing it back.  Dean is seeing, for the first time, that Castiel has rolled up the cuffs of his shirt just above the bone of his wrist, and Dean is caught there, with the wind pushing at him and the smell of rainwater filling his lungs and Castiel looking at him with his hands tangled in his unruly hair and Dean feels like he is holding the entire earth inside his chest.  He feels like he is going to explode, or fall to his knees, or hold his arms up in the air and dance, and he doesn’t know this feeling; if he’s ever felt this before it must have been long ago, before the lines on his face and the gray in his hair, and it has long since faded to dust in his memories.  But Dean’s feeling it now.

I don’t know, Dean tells him, bewildered.  He’s still feeling it.  He feels it all over his body, down to the tips of his fingers and toes.  

“You look different,” Castiel is saying.  “You look wonderful.”  The wind is tugging at the hem of Castiel’s flannel shirt, pulling it tight against his chest and then billowing out, and that hair in his eyes and those wrists, those wrists, and Dean doesn’t know what this feeling is but it is glorious.  He has died and come back to life, but it has never felt anything like this.

\--

He feels different, afterward.  Like he has been missing something fundamental, and he’s gotten back one small piece.  

For the first time he’s noticing things again.  He’s stopping to notice the sensation of cool water dripping from the sink faucet on his hands.  He’s stopping to catalog the feeling of sunlight on his face.  He’s sitting on the couch late late at night, long after their movie has finished, taking a moment to take in Castiel’s warm sleeping weight pressed against his shoulder.  He’s feeling that wild rush all over again.  It’s too much.  It’s too much.  He can’t just sit there with this feeling  coursing through him, so he lays Castiel’s head down on the couch cushions and takes his keys off the hook by the kitchen door.

Dean runs when he doesn’t know what else to do, always has.  When everything is too much, too close, too soon.  When his chest gets too crowded with things Dean can’t comprehend, can’t put a name to, he has always jumped in the car and driven as fast as he could.  Eating up highway until his hands stop shaking, until all the colors have washed out of him, leaving him edged with gray. Like he’s a black and white version of himself. Until there’s nothing inside him eating him up.  Until there’s nothing left at all.

Dean takes the Impala and he drives and drives.  But it’s different this time.  He’s cruising.  He’s riding along at five under the speed limit.  And he’s looking.  

He’s looking at trees.  River birches on the outside of town by the lake.  White oak in the cow pasture on the highway.  He’s looking at houses.  The big farmhouses, with green shutters and tin roofs; he’s looking at the small houses with old wood siding and faded blue paint.  Some of those houses make that feeling come back, Dean doesn’t know why.  He’s driving along a stretch of California highway, with the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other, and he takes a detour after detour until he’s driving through a neighborhood with small stucco houses.  He’s looking at the sycamores growing along the sidewalks and he’s looking at the green and purple cacti behind the leaning picket fences and then Dean’s looking at a small stucco houses with faded pink paint, and there’s it goes, there’s that feeling again, swelling up tight in his chest.  

He parks the Impala and looks and looks at that small pink house, at the shabby wild roses rambling up the mailbox, at the peeling white shutters, at the yard with faded grass and bare patches of sandy dirt, he’s looking at the laundry line running down the sideyard, at the string of Christmas lights still hanging from the eaves even though it’s May, and the feeling is rushing through him, making him dizzy, until he has to put his head on his hands on the steering wheel.  

What’s this feeling?  he keeps asking himself.  What is it? what is it?  He’s going through the whole catalog of emotions he’s known over the years, fear anger hate - it’s none of those - greed jealousy desire, he doesn’t know, he doesn’t understand why this small pink house makes him feel so overwhelmed; it’s not sadness or exhaustion or anything else he can name.  

Is it want? He asks himself.  Do I want this house? Do I want to buy it? Do I want to live here?  He sits and tries to picture it, calling up the number on the for sale sign in the front yard, tries to imagine signing the paperwork and pulling in the driveway with his own key for the first time.  He tries to picture moving in, packing up his boxes of records and all his clothes, even the most tattered ones, hanging all his shirts in the closet.  Repainting the walls.  Shopping for a new couch.  But it’s not quite what he’s feeling.

What is this feeling? He has to know, so he drives and drives and searches for anything else that makes him feel that way.  It’s addictive.  It’s like the first jolt of coffee early in the morning.  You keep coming back for it, because of how it makes you feel.  

He stops at a Wal-Mart and buys a cell phone with a good camera.  He wants to take pictures.  He thinks if he can just get this house or that tree focused through the lens, he can trap the feeling, he can make it stay.  Maybe he can call it up whenever he wants it, just by looking through his gallery.  He shows all his pictures to Castiel, and Castiel ohhs and ahhs over every one.

\--

Lately he’s felt like he’s walking around wrapped in cotton.  Everything seems so far away.  Even Sam.  Even Castiel.  It’s hard to feel like things matter when there’s three layers of fog between you and the world.  He tells himself that it’s great.  That he’s free.  That nothing can bother him.  Isn’t that what you’re supposed to go for?  To evolve until nothing gets at you anymore?  Aren’t there religions that are supposed to get you to nothing?

Castiel is quiet when Dean says that. “I don’t know,” he says.  He sounds troubled.  “I don’t think so.”   

Then what is anybody working for anyway? Dean is asking him.  Why is everyone working so hard?  What are you supposed to want?

“I don’t know,” Castiel says again.  “Don’t you know what you want, Dean?  I do.”

How can you just know?  How is it so simple for you? Dean wants to ask, but he feels himself drawing away; Castiel is going somewhere that Dean has always been afraid to go, even when he has that feeling rushing through him.  

\--

Dean’s started feeling other things, too, the same feelings he’s known all his life, anger, fear, adrenaline - only now it’s different.  It’s the difference between listening to a cd on headphones and blasting Metallica on the speakers with the windows rolled down: Everything is louder, everything is stronger, and it’s too much, it’s too much. He breaks the coffee mug Sam bought him, the one with the cracked green glaze, and he’s shouting and slamming his fist on the table and pounding the heel of his boot into the shards, gritting them into dust, and his throat is too tight and his eyes ache, and he’s crying, without any warning, all over a broken coffee mug.

He’s gathering his hands over his eyes, holding the tears at bay. But it’s not working.  The tears come sliding out anyway.  What’s wrong with me? he’s whispering, over and over.  What’s wrong with me? But Castiel can hear him.  He carefully sweeps up the dust and sharp ceramic pieces and throws them away.  Then he is pulling back the chair next to Dean and his large, warm hands are there on Dean’s face.  Pulling back Dean’s hands and uncovering his red-rimmed eyes.  

I’m broken, Dean tells him, and Castiel says, “No.  That’s not it at all.”  His thumb is stroking the spot right over Dean’s ear, smoothing back the fine hairs there.  He is wiping away Dean’s tears.  “You are healing.”

It hurts, Dean just says.  The tears keep coming.  I don’t think I will ever be all right again.

“Oh, Dean,” Castiel is sighing.  He puts his hand on the back of Dean’s head and rests his forehead on Dean’s and then he is kissing Dean so carefully, right by the corner of Dean’s eyes, and in the midst of all the tears and hurt Dean feels it again, crashing down on him like a tidal wide.  “You will be.  I just know.”

Dean closes his eyes and lets the feeling storm inside him.  How do you know?

“Because you want to be,” Castiel says.  It’s too much.  It’s too much.  And all Dean can do is let it take him over, let himself feel it all the way down to his bones, so he does.

\--

“Joy,” Sam says.  He sounds so certain.  “I know what that feeling is.  I’ve felt it before.”

No, Dean says.  It can’t be that.  It’s not being happy.  It’s not like eating a good piece of pecan pie or listening to a good song or knowing that one more bad thing is gone for good.  It’s not being happy, Sam.

“It’s not happy,” Sam says.  “It’s something else.  It makes you feel like you want everything in the world, and like you already have it, all at the same time,” and when Sam says that Dean can feel it, in his throat and behind his eyelids and in his hands and feet and heart, all of him, all at once.  Joy.  He tries it out.  Dean still doesn’t know.

But the feeling is this: Sam listening so carefully to him, sitting so still.  Not even looking away.  He’s right here with Dean -- and it’s this.  This is what he’s been wanting.  Just to have someone sit with him and be here. Not with them both sitting on their motel doubles, each of them on their own laptops, the only sound in the room being the quiet clicking of their mouses.  This.  Just being here, together.  It’s the same feeling he gets when Castiel is right there with him, in both his darkest moments and when he feels so light-hearted he thinks he could almost float off into the wide blue sky.    

Joy, he thinks.  It sounds about right.  Okay.

\--

Dean feels it again lying next to Castiel, one morning in their little pink house, in the bedroom with the yellow walls that Castiel painted two months ago.  Castiel is naked on the soft white sheets beside him, sleeping on his stomach.  Dean is running a hand up and down Castiel’s back, and that’s when he feels it: That wild joy, rushing through him.  It’s too much for this small yellow room.  It’s too much for this quiet moment.  

Dean’s hand stops its movement and Castiel raises his head, murmuring, Dean, are you all right?  

Dean lets the feeling take him. You’d think it wouldn’t be this strong still, now that he knows what it is.  But it still feels like drowning.  It’s still too much; oh, it’s everything in the wide world and beyond.  He closes his eyes.

“I’m wonderful,” Dean is saying, because he is, oh, he is.  “Shhh.  Baby, go back to sleep.”

  


**Author's Note:**

> “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning." - Psalm 30:5


End file.
